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Court can put price on couple’s lost goods but not on precious links to past

We live in a world that prizes the accumulation of wealth and the piling up of material possessions.

We have a good laugh about filling our homes with stuff. Spare rooms become storerooms, and closets are stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey. Two-car garages beget three-car garages, and eventually we've jammed them to overflowing. Finally, we justify renting a separate storage unit to preserve yet even more really good stuff.

We celebrate, catalog and calculate the grand total of our stuff.

But when you cut through all the clutter, all the wants disguised as needs, what things do you value the most?

If they were lost and you had to assign them a price, how much would they be worth?

That's the question being posed in a local courtroom in a civil case involving the loss of the stored possessions of Robert and Elena Brown. In late August, a jury awarded the Browns $100,000 following a two-day trial in which it found Maycliff Mini Storage liable for accidentally selling their possessions from a unit for which they had prepaid one year's rent.

According to court documents, the Browns made the prepayment in December 2004 because they were leaving the United States for Germany, where they had agreed to become guardians of their grandchildren while their children served a tour of military duty for the Iraq war.

The question of liability wasn't much in doubt. The company sold the contents of the unit without the proper notification and committed other violations of its own policies. Even the late-payment postcard sent to the Browns arrived at an address they no longer used instead of the residence listed on the change-of-address they had submitted to the company.

By the Browns' estimate, one not disputed by the defense at trial, their belongings could be replaced for approximately $76,000. Those damages doubled would have been $152,000. Instead, the jury awarded the couple only $100,000 in total.

But who could put a dollar value on the things no one could replace?

Like the ashes of Robert's infant daughter, Jamie Marie, who died shortly after her birth Jan. 29, 1985, from a fatal heart defect. They are gone now.

As Robert recently retold the story, his voice filled with emotion even after more than 20 years. A man doesn't carry around the ashes of his lost child without a deep emotional attachment. The family was so dedicated to the memory of the newborn that the urn containing her ashes accompanied the Browns on vacations.

"When the doctors determined there was nothing they could do, they gave my wife and I an option to either leave her there in the hospital or let her pass away peacefully at home," Robert recalls.

"We ran home real quick to get a little carrier and an outfit to bring her home in. But by the time we got back, the nurse said her little heart was down to 40 beats per minute. She said, 'We never let our babies die without being held,' and she handed her to me. The baby died in my arms.

"Losing her ashes was like losing her all over again. As far as I know, she's buried under a mountain of trash in a landfill, tossed out like everyday garbage."

Gone also are the family's photo albums and home videos.

"What we really miss is the stuff we can't show our kids or our grandkids anymore," Elena says.

"It's videos of the funny things that they did when they were small. It's just wiped out our family history. We have no past to show them and relive with them. It's still really hard."

The Browns' attorneys, Terry Moore and Terry Coffing, have asked District Judge Ken Cory to increase the jury's award. The award figure could go up to $300,000, but something tells me the Browns would trade it in a second for a chance to have returned the things that really matter.

We live in a world with a price for almost every possession and material object, but no one has yet been able to successfully appraise the true value of those things that bind us in a collective memory as family. There's no calculator for that.

What are your memories worth?

John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0295.

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